try, and he was willing to die protecting its freedom. "Especially after 9/11," he said. He was born and raised in Roselle, New Jersey, across New York Harbor from the World Trade towers; he had won trophies in state championships in the hundred-and-ten-metre high hurdle, and he hoped one day to be a Roselle po- liceman or a New Jersey state trooper. "And to see that happen on my own soil," he said. "It turned it up a notch." But after four or five nights of running the M.I. block of the Abu Ghraib hard site, Davis said, "I just wanted to go home." He felt that what he did and saw there was wrong. "But it was reaffirmed and reassured through the leadership: We're at war. This is Military Intelli- gence. This is what they do. And it's just a job," he said. "So, over time, you be- come numb to it, and it's nothing. It just became the norm. You see it-that sucks. It sucks to be him. And that's it. You " move on. Sabrina Harman also said she felt herself growing numb at Abu Ghraib, yet she kept being startled by her capac- ity to feel fresh shocks. "In the begin- ning," she said, "you see somebody naked and you see underwear on their head and you're like, 'Oh, that's pretty bad-I can't believe I just saw that.' And then you go to bed and you come back the next day and you see something worse. Well, it seems like the day before wasn't so bad." Harman was a runner on the night shift at the hard site, filling in where help was needed. "I really don't remember the first day," she said. "I remember the first day of working in Tier 1A and lB. The first thing that I noticed was this guy- he had underwear on his head and he was handcuffed backwards to a window, and they were pretty much asking him questions. And then there was another guy who was fully dressed in another cell they were interrogating also, or I guess they had already interrogated. That's the first time I started taking photos." The prisoner with the underwear on his head was the one the M.P.s called Taxi Driver. He was naked, and the position he was in-his hands bound behind his back and raised higher than his shoulders, forcing him to bend forward with his head bowed and his weight suspended from his wrists-is known as a "Palestin- ian hanging," because it is said to be used in Israeli prisons. Later that evening, Taxi Driver was moved to a bed, and Harman took another picture of him there. Then she saw another prisoner, lying on his bed fully dressed, and she photographed him, too. As far as Harman knew at the time, nobody else had taken any pictures on Tier lA, although later she saw one from a few days earlier of a naked man in the corridor, handcuffed to the bars of a cell door. She wasn't surprised. By the end of Harman's first night, three of the M.P.s had taken at least twenty- five photographs, and over the ensuing months the M.P.s on the night shift took hundreds more pictures on the M.I. block. The officer in charge of the block at night, Corporal Charles Gra- ner, said that he made a point of show- ing his photographs to officers higher up the chain of command, and that no- body objected to what they saw. On the contrary, after a month on the job, and after showing scores of photographs of prisoners in torment to his superiors, Graner received a written assessment from his captain, a frequent visitor to the block, who said, "You are doing a fine job. . . . You have received many ac- colades from the M.I. units here." Most of the photographs from Har- man's first night show solitary naked prisoners in stress positions, cuffed to the bars of their cells or stretched and bent, forward or backward, over a bunk bed, with their hands bound to the far railing. Some of the prisoners are hooded with sandbags, some with underpants. One naked man is lying face down on a con- crete floor. Several photographs show a row of prisoners in orange jumpsuits doing pushups in the hallway, and in one Staff Sergeant Ivan (Chip) Frederick- the night-shift officer in charge of the whole hard site-can be made out, in the background. Nobody in these photo- graphs appears to be aware of the camera, and the pictures have the quality of sto- len glimpses of men rendered into hellish statuary. Harman said that she began photographing what she saw because she found it hard to believe. "If I come up to you and I'm like, 'Hey this is going on,' you probably wouldn't believe me unless I had something to show you," she said. "So if I say, 'Hey this is going on. Look, I have proof:' you can't deny it, I